Tuesday, December 10, 2013

I'm a fourth grade special education teacher in NYC. Our school
has acquired a new reading/writing program and has discontinued a grammar
program we've used for several years. In the new program the grammar component
is virtually non-existent. On a gut level I feel that students are struggling
with test questions, even math ones, due to lack of practice/knowledge of
grammar. They simply don't understand what the questions are asking. I was
wondering what your opinion/research shows as far as the relationship between
grammar instruction and reading comprehension. Do you have any preference
as far as grammar programs/teaching methodologies go?

Great
question. There is a lot of evidence showing the importance of grammar in
reading comprehension. Studies over the years have shown a clear relationship
between syntactic or grammatical sophistication and reading comprehension; that
is, as students learn to employ more complex sentences in their oral and
written language, their ability to make sense of what they read increases, too.

Also,
readability measures are able to predict how well students will comprehend particular texts on the basis of only two variables: vocabulary sophistication
and grammatical complexity. At least for the Lexile formula, grammar is much more
heavily weighted than vocabulary. This means that the text factor that is most
predictive of comprehensibility is how complicated the sentences are
grammatically.

There
are also experimental studies that show that there are ways that grammar can be
taught formally that improve reading comprehension. For example, teaching
students to combine sentences seems to improve how well students understand
what they read. Clearly, it makes sense to guide students to understand how
sentences work.

Studies
of metacognition and theories of reading comprehension suggest the importance
of students having a language of grammar (knowing the difference between a noun
and a verb for example), and common sense would suggest that it makes sense to
help students to unpack sentences that confuse them.

That
doesn’t necessarily justify a lot of grammar worksheets and the like, but it
does argue for teaching students about sentences as they meet them. For
example, look at the following sentence from Nikki Giovanni:

“The
women of Montgomery, both young and older, would come in with their fancy
holiday dresses that needed adjustments or their Sunday suits and blouses that
needed just a touch—a flower or some velvet trimming or something to make the
ladies look festive.”

It
is a long sentence (44 words), and it has lots of embedding (witness the
author’s use of 2 commas and an em-dash). I surmise many students would
struggle to make sense of this sentence primarily because of the complex
grammar. How would you deal with this?

First,
I would have the students read this page from Giovanni’s Rosa and one of the questions I would ask would be, “What did the
women of Montgomery do?” Perhaps I’d find that the students weren’t as
perplexed as I assumed in which case I’d move on. But let’s imagine that they
couldn’t answer my question... then I’d show them how to break this sentence
down.

For
example, I would point out that the phrase between the commas, “both young and
older,” adds an idea but that I want to set it aside for now. That would
simplify the sentence a bit:

“The
women of Montgomery would come in with their fancy holiday dresses that needed
adjustments or their Sunday suits and blouses that needed just a touch – a
flower or some velvet trimming or something to make the ladies look festive.”

Even
with such a simple change, I bet more kids would understand it better, but
maybe not. Let’s go further:

As
with the commas, the word “that” (which shows up twice here) signals the
inclusion of a separate or additional idea, and as a reader that is another
point of attack that I can use in trying to interpret this sentence. And the
word “or” is another good place to separate these additional ideas.

Let’s
slice the sentence at the first “that” and the first “or:”

“The
women of Montgomery would come in with their fancy holiday dresses”

“that
needed adjustments”

"or their Sunday suits and blouses that needed just a touch–a flower or some
velvet trimming or something to make the ladies look festive."

Obviously,
we could keep breaking this one down, but again, many kids would get it at this
point: The women were bringing in their fancy dresses… Which women? The young
and the old. Which fancy dresses? The ones that needed adjustments. What other
kinds of outfits did they bring in? Sunday suits and blouses. Which suits and
blouses? The ones that needed just a touch—something that would make them look
festive.

The
point of this kind of exchange would not be to teach grammar per se, but to
help students to untangle complex grammar so that they could independently make
sense of what they read. Frankly, few of our children know what to do when they
confront this kind of text complexity. Kids who know something about sentences
and parts of speech will be at an advantage, but they still will not
necessarily be able to interpret a sentence from that alone. This kind of
scaffolded analysis is aimed at both untangling the meaning of this sentence
and in giving students some tools for unpacking such sentences when they are on
their own.

Your
reading program should provide some instruction in grammar, and it should provide
you with some support in providing students with instruction in parts of
speech, sentence combining, and/or the kinds of scaffolding demonstrated here.
It is pure romanticism that assumes that children will just figure this kind of
thing out without any explicit instruction (and it is even more foolish to
assume that English language learners will intuit these things without more
direct support).

Timothy Shanahan

Follow by Email

Using This Blog

*** To Subscribe put your email address into Follow by Email (top right hand side) and you will be informed of new posts.***All past blogs are filed by topic and many contain download links to Word or Powerpoint files

***To comment--or to see the comments of others--just click on a blog title and go to the bottom of the page

Search This Blog

About Me

Timothy Shanahan is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he was Founding Director of the Center for Literacy and chair of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. He is also visiting research professor at Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is principal investigator of the National Title I Study of Implementation and Outcomes: Early Childhood Language Development. Professor Shanahan was director of reading for the Chicago Public Schools. His research emphasizes reading-writing relationships, reading assessment, and improving reading achievement. He is past president of the International Reading Association. In 2006, he received a presidential appointment to serve on the Advisory Board of the National Institute for Literacy. He was inducted to the Reading Hall of Fame in 2007. He is a former first-grade teacher.